Sleek, modern home on Model Farm Road is fit for a Hilton
The outer suburban address Hilton, off Cork City’s western reaches and the Model Farm Rd, has been deemed ‘upmarket’ since its earliest days, with family homes here going back to the 1960s and ’70s, and much favoured down the decades with the ‘professional classes,’ being appreciated and pursued by doctors, dentists, and lawyers alike.
“If you weren’t well, you’d only have to open your door and call out your ailment and there’d be a medic along to look after you,” quips one of the owners of No 6 Hilton, as they prepare to move on.
They’ve just completed a top-to-tail job in the 45-year-old build, leaving it in a physically robust and hale and hearty state.
If it was a patient, it would have a rosy shine on its pink cheeks, after its full-physical and ensuing clean bill of health.
High-end in Hilton, No 6 straddles the middle of its mature, 0.5-acre site in this leafy enclave of large homes, on even larger grounds: No one is giving sites like this with any new builds anymore, and this home’s positioning on a corner site, with dual entrances, means it gets sun all day long.
Most importantly, it has a south and west facing paved patio soaking up all available heat for evenings in at home, and barbies out the back.
It’s only three years since No 6 was last for sale, and the vendors then had put on a side sunroom extension off the kitchen, among other changes and updates.
The current owners took it all a step further — now there’s nothing at all to do, bar move in furniture.
Back then, No 6 had a €625,000 asking price and shows up in 2014 on the price register as having made €590,000: since then, too, considerable extra sums have been poured into its completion to what estate agent Brian Olden of Cohalan Downing bills as “an exacting standard, characterised by large, light-filled spaces”.
Most notable is the further opening up of ground-floor rooms to create a super-sized Noblessa kitchen/dining/family living room with patio access, and quality fitted kitchen units and appliances.
There’s a veritable bank of Neff ovens, four-square, with double ovens, steam oven, coffee machine, integrated fridge/freezer, Neff induction hob with slick, retractable Miele downdraft extractor set into a broad island, with Franke under-sink in the white stone worktop.
It’s a well-designed and specced kitchen, with gloss German units fitted by Denis Lane of Carrigaline.
It looks back to both the apex-roofed sun-room/dining area and into an opened-up linked family room complete with powerful, fan assisted 12kw wood-burning wall-mounted stove, all finished with the same polished timber flooring, with overhead LED recessed lighting, and newly corniced ceilings throughout, in a range of styles (No 6’s inhabitants moved here from a fully restored large period home across the city, so were used to ‘all the trimmings’.)
When they bought here in Hilton, they lived here first as-was, to get a feel for how its rooms worked and flowed, and then they moved out for the makeover to follow.
It has been drylined, has all new lighting, top-end bathrooms on its two levels, has been future-proofed with baths and wet-room/walk-in showers both upstairs and down, and is fully redecorated.
There’s a great ground-floor plan. Across the wide hall and feature staircase, with its mahogany handrails around three sides up to a central landing, is a carpeted study.
Behind is a carpeted living room, some 15’ square, with cast iron fireplace, and this has been kept close to a large bathroom with free-standing bath and walk-in double shower, and so is accessible for all ages and needs in terms of future planning.
Overhead, four bedrooms — all doubles — are ranged off an open airy landing past a feature stained glass window, and the master bedroom is en suite, with a further double shower.
A glazed door leads to a long, covered balcony across one of No 6’s facades, overlooking the paved pedestrian entrance.
The other three bedrooms are carpeted and have corniced ceilings (all by Nicky Sisk of Grecian Mouldings), while the main family bathroom has a heritage-style bath and separate double shower.
One landing section has a pull-down stairs for access to a full-floor attic level, with gable window: this space is enormous
No 6’s main approach access/axis is going to be by car and front/side drive facing the large public green, and this leads to a handy double garage, with electric roller shutter doors.
From this garage there’s a covered side passage to utility/rear, absolutely ideal for offloading children, pets, shopping, sports gear, and other family paraphernalia, in all weathers.
Even though No 6 Hilton hasn’t gained extra square footage since it last changed hands in 2014, it has planning in place to be super-sized, but with an existing 2,465 sq ft of fully usable accommodation, it will fit more families fine.
Then, factor in the site of half an acre, the privacy, the extra landscaping by Charlie O’Leary of the Pavilion Garden Centre, and the limestone paving, patio and pillar tops, and the sheer draw of Hilton, ’twixt the city and Ballincollig — and hospitals and third-level colleges — and, really, this is one that’s likely to sell now, in relative jig-time.
In the prime of Hilton health
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